Game of the Month: July 2006

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The winner this month beat the living snot out of every other contender.

By IGN PlayStation Team

With all the videogames released each and every month, it can be a difficult task to decide on which title to spend your hard-earned money. Granted, you could always go by our review scores alone and weed through the long list of names to find something that scored high or low, but what if you had somewhere else to turn?

Rather than wait until the end of the year for our big award blowout, your friends here at IGN.com have decided to employ a monthly tribute to the weeks that were. We've resolved to illustrate to our readers what we thought was the very best game for each system in the past month, and tell you the reason why.

Though some of us often chime in with our comments at the end of reviews, for the most part, the reviews on IGN are primarily written by one editor; in this feature we get all of the editors on a particular channel to vote for a single title. What better way to represent a team is there than to speak your collective minds at once?

How does it work? It's simple. Any game released in the past month is eligible for the award and is taken through a battery of tests by every editor on that particular channel. After we've finished evaluating each game we put our heads together and decide on a single "best of" winner that's worthy of the title "IGN Game of the Month." Pretty straightforward, don't you think?

Now that we have the guidelines out of the way, let's move on, and congratulate this month's winner...

Why We Picked It: Fans of the Playstation Portable finally get a masterpiece fighting game to call their own. It certainly took long enough, as any genre veteran will attest, but the final product made it worth the wait. The game does nearly everything right, from delivering amazing visuals and sound, to offering refined fight mechanics, Dark Resurrection defies you to find any flaws. Throw in a bunch of new modes and you've got one slick package.

Reader Review quote: " Tekken has been around for over a decade now and every gamer has come to love the series. Even Martial Artists are fans of this excellent fighting franchise. Now finally, here comes the perfect fighting." (Read the full review) -- submitted by A1998Smackdown

Why We Picked It: In short, RPG fans owe it to themselves to purchase this game. It's a bit of a disappointment that Lenneth received a face lift, and not a sweeping overhaul, but the changes do make you enjoy the game a bit more. Also, this is still the best RPG that the PSP has received to date, and fans of the genre will definitely be pleased with this title.Other Games Worth Noting in July:

Thank the gaming gods for Namco and its PSP iteration of Tekken. Without it, July would have been one slow and depressing month. Things will change in coming months. And by change, you should understand things will go absolutely nuts once September rolls around. Systems will launch and poppin' fresh titles will flood store shelves. All it takes is a little patience.